Explanation of Why Hard Disk Seems Smaller Than It Should Be
This article will give you a simple explanation of a basic computer concept which is confusing to people pretty frequently. First, I will define a pair of common computer terms that it will help for you to understand.that it’ll help for you to know.
What I’ll also do is straighten out why there seems to be a difference between the size of a computer’s hard disk when you buy it, or what’s on the label on your computer, and how much its capacity, when you’re actually looking at what it says on the computer screen, why it seems to not be as big.
First, let me define those computer terms. The terms are “erase” and “format.” Both of these terms essentially are synonymous — therefore you can use them interchangeably.
The hard disk is the part in your computer that in fact stores everything, your documents, pictures, music and the operating system of your computer itself, which might be Windows or Mac OS X or anything else. Usually, everything that’s saved in the computer is going to be kept in the hard disk.
Hard drives have been measured for some time in gigabytes and are now moving into the terabyte range, which is the next level after gigabytes.
A byte is basically the smallest unit of measurement for computers (only bits are smaller than bytes). A kilobyte is around 1,000 bytes. A megabyte is approximately 1,000,000 bytes. A gigabyte is basically 1 billion bytes. A terabyte is essentially 1 trillion bytes. It’s going to go a long way beyond there but not for a few more years, so let’s forget that for now.
For example, you have a machine that is a few years old. A person might have the idea you have a specific amount of storage space on your hard drive based on the label on the computer, or the specs on the sheet of paper that you got when you got the computer.
Let’s what if you want to find out the size of the drive. If you’ve got one of Apple’s Mac computers, you can do this by selecting the the drive icon on your desktop, then clicking on the File menu and then clicking on “Get Info.” That’ll give you a window that lists the size of the drive.
On a Windows PC, you go into the Computer icon and select the hard disc icon. It’ll generally tell you what the size of the drive is on the left side of the window.
If you’re not sure how this works, I suggest Windows XP how to or Mac OS X how to training, but specifically video lessons that show you the steps.
Once you know the size of the drive, it will turn out smaller than it seems like it should be.
This is because of what happens when you set up the drive for use. “Erasing” or “formatting” is getting the drive ready for use. Until this happens, the drive is almost like the foundation of a house or a house pad before the house is built.
You can’t obviously live a house pad because there aren’t any walls and no roof. So that’s what happens when you setup a hard disk. You “partition” and format it. Maybe you’ve heard the word partition as a divider that separates one area of a room from another. A partition is basically the same thing.
When a person partition and format a hard drive, or erasing it, whichever term you prefer, what you’re doing is basically constructing the walls. You start off with the house pad, and then you put up the walls and the roof and you make it ready for use. Until you do that, a person can’t live in it.
For the same reason, if you have a hard drive that’s not setup, you can’t store anything onto it because it doesn’t have any walls or a roof.
So if you think about erasing or formatting a drive, that is, getting it ready to be used, as being like putting a house on of a foundation, you might already have an idea why a hard drive’s size seems smaller than it should be.
It’s almost as if you’ve lost space when you format it, compared to what the drive says it is if you look at the actual physical drive label, the box it came in or on the outside of the machine that came with that drive inside it. You’ll find it says a larger number than you seem to have when you’re checking the drive’s size once it has been set up to be used on the computer.
If you start off with a house pad that’s a thousand square feet, once you’ve built the walls, you don’t have all the full amount of square feet left any more, not in real, floor space. You have some of that space taken up by the walls.
Essentially , that’s what happens when you format a disk. It gets partitioned and formatted and ready to use. In that process, it loses a little bit of that space. You may find it’s a pretty good way to think about it, and it helps people understand.
I hope that clarifies things. A lot of my clients have asked me about that that’s how I explain it to them, and it seems to make sense to them. I hope it makes some sense for you.
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